Internet pornography is sometimes abusive and often violent. Mark Bridger, convicted yesterday of the murder of April Jones, had compiled a store of it. Violent pornography is easily and freely accessible, and at most requires only a credit card. The link between such material and actual violence, most commonly against women and children, is disputed – occasional studies claim there is, as one headline had it, a sunny side to smut. But there is strong evidence that at the very least it is addictive, can normalise violence, and at the same time diminishes sympathy for its victims. It is a kind of incitement to hate. Abusive and violent pornography should be banned. But that is easier to say than to do.

Part of the problem is that internet porn is a global business. Dealing with it requires global, or at least wide, support. An attempt by the European parliament earlier this year to insert a porn ban into equal rights legislation was brought down, with opponents including members of the Pirate party, in the name of freedom. In the UK, regulations about internet safety are occasionally enforced – as Playboy learned to its cost recently when Ofcom found its child safety protocols inadequate – but imposing a general ban has so far been rejected. There are some good reasons for care, including the risk of cutting off access to respectable sites dealing with sexual health or rape support. Iceland's last government, which had already radically tightened the laws on paying for sex, including treating sex workers as victims and prosecuting their clients, had intended to legislate – but lost power in April. The new centre-right government may yet pursue the proposal.

David Cameron has taken a keen interest in protecting children from exposure to internet porn but seems reluctant to lead. So progress here has been limited. A law banning extreme porn was introduced in 2009, but police immediately said they would not target users. Instead government has concentrated on soft measures: a push to ensure that all free Wi-Fi zones that children might use include a lock-down on porn; an effort, supported by the culture minister Ed Vaizey, as well as Claire Perry, Mr Cameron's internet-and-children adviser, to persuade all ISPs to provide porn filtering devices as a default setting was blocked on the grounds of too little public support.

Meanwhile, the market sinks lower and lower, from the glumly predictable announcement this week of a porn app for Google Glass, to a "revenge porn" site where stolen images of women were posted and the victims required to pay to get them removed. A straightforward ban on violent and abusive pornography may be unenforceable. But there are ways of introducing a de facto bar – for example, preventing UK credit cards being used on such porn sites. What's still lacking is the will to show the way. But the misery of the April Jones case should spur a revival of the effort.

• This article was amended on 31 May 2013 to clarify that the intention of the editorial was to propose restrictions on violent and abusive pornography, as opposed to pornography in general. The original also incorrectly stated that it was Dutch members of the Pirate party who brought down attempts to insert a proposed ban on pornography into European equal rights legislation.